Dangerous Dan's Book Blog

Shade, the Changing Man, Vol. 1: The American Scream by Peter Milligan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An alien named Shade wins up in the body of a killer while he's being executed in the electric chair. Shade and Kathy, daughter of two of the killer's victims, go on a strange odyssey and combat the American Scream...

When people talk about British comic writers, Peter Milligan is usually an afterthought after the big three of Moore, Gaiman, and Morrison. While Shade isn't my favorite of Milligan's work, it gives hints as to what he's capable of.

Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing lead to a lot of British writers getting work reviving some of DC's forgotten characters. Milligan ended up with Shade, an old Steve Ditko character, and put out a book that consistently competed with the Doom Patrol as one of DC's weirdest books.

My plot summary doesn't do the book justice. The weirdness level is high and Milligan works JFK, Hollywood, and a lot of other distinctly American things into the mix. It's a fun ride even though I'm not quite sure what happened in parts. I'm giving it a 3, partly for nostalgia reasons and partly because I know it only gets better from here.

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